


Don't Run

by CopperBeech



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angel Wings, Assault, Don't copy to another site, Drinking & Talking, Gen, Grave Robbers, Robbery, The Annunciation, the ineffable plan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-26
Updated: 2019-09-26
Packaged: 2020-10-28 10:00:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20776700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CopperBeech/pseuds/CopperBeech
Summary: Two encounters outside Jerusalem on the first Easter Sunday morning."We’re all supposed to just do our jobs, they never give you a reason, never say well done, here’s why we asked you. He gave you a job. You did it. It hurt. Welcome to the Great Ineffable Bloody Plan. Don’t run now. That’s what cowards do.”





	Don't Run

**Author's Note:**

> CW for offstage suicide and semi-graphic descriptions of injuries.
> 
> Lighter-hearted CW for various forms of heresy and blasphemy that will likely bother few members of this fandom.

_Why is the woman terror-struck?  
Can there be mercy in that look?_

_–– _Yeats_, A Nativity Poem_

She was already sitting near the tomb when he arrived, several yards away on a rock outcropping, weeping messily into a fold of her garments. It was a surprise, now that he drew close, to see the grieving mother of an adult man who still looked so youthful. He remembered then how young she had been when they’d first met, how little Gabriel had cared about the shock. “She should rejoice to be made part of the Great Plan!” he’d said when Aziraphale questioned him about it, as if that explained everything: jolting a barely pubescent girl with the manifestation of a fully revealed Archangel in her bedroom at midnight, wings shedding light, not to mention perfect teeth reflecting it at a high wattage and the reverberation of what Aziraphale thought of as Gabriel’s Trumpet Voice. The child had been pale and mute with panic, too frightened to cry or even speak.

It had been Aziraphale whom her parents had brought in to comfort her, in the guise of an old woman from the next street, such as have existed in every century and place, who had a reputation for being able to help with illness and injuries. He’d been assigned that form for several months while they were cooking up this maneuver Upstairs. First-Century Judaea wasn’t that bad a place to exist, reasonably cosmopolitan, but this wasn’t exactly the hub of it.

The parents assumed, from the girl’s speechless distress and the way her hands kept straying to her lower body, that she’d been violated, probably by one of the occupying Roman soldiers. It happened. Some families would have treated the girl as defiled; they were kinder, and only wanted old Ruth the midwife – he’d chosen the name; it meant “friend” – to calm her tremors, check her for injuries, help her sleep. He had the power to ease her distress, and managed it while pretending to do the offices of an amateur healer.

When he left her sleeping in her room, the parents were arguing quietly in the little space that served as both kitchen and living area. The father was of the line of David, but not much of the splendor had trickled down to them, only the cachet of the ancestry, which they wore with a defiant pride. The mother wanted the father to complain to the Procurator. “Nothing will come of it,” he said. “We’d only attract the wrong kind of attention. She’s been hurt enough, they’d find a way to make it worse.”

The mother had touched old Ruth’s sleeve. “If she’s – “ She hesitated. “If there’s a – a – can you fix it?”

“If there is to be a child, there must be a child,” he said. “But I’ll care for her.”

The husband had been comforting his crying wife, sitting close by her side with one hand over hers, as Aziraphale stepped out.

* * *

Now he drew near to the small boulder to comfort the grieving mother in much the same posture, once he was sure she had looked up and seen him and did not fear his approach.

“Did you – follow him?” she hiccupped. She had made a snotty mess of her mantle; Aziraphale returned it to cleanliness, discreetly, and nodded. “I – heard him speak several times.”

“I knew we should have watched. But we were all so tired.”

She nodded at the heavy stone lying at an angle in front of the mouth of the tomb, then leaned over into a bout of fresh sobs.

“People will be saying that he rose again,” said Aziraphale.

He couldn’t tell if the shake of her head was a negative, or the repetitive movement of distracted grief. He put an arm around her shoulders, tentatively. As on that morning more than thirty years before, he was able to ease her, a little bit.

“I know,” she said at last. “They’ll want to believe that. No, I know what happened. Robbers who had a few coins to make from selling the graveclothes. We bought the best linen we could. It’s dear.” When she dried her eyes this time the tears didn’t flood back at once. “We sewed him into the shroud. They’ll have taken him – wherever to unpick the stitches. More money that way.”

Aziraphale withdrew his hand, remembering that there were probably a half-dozen rules about why he shouldn’t be touching her, although she hadn’t pulled away. The sun was well up now, but it was still cold. He felt distinctly queasy about what he’d been sent to do.

“My other sons will be here soon, and his friends. They – went to buy the myrrh, and spikenard. We couldn’t find any before the Sabbath sundown. I – just wanted to spend some time alone with him. Now this.” Her hands closed into fists. “He only told people to love one another, and they took everything, _everything – “_ She stood, surprising the angel. “The rulers and the robbers. One’s like the other. They take your sons, and leave you weeping. They take what you have, whether it’s taxes or thieves. This ground is drenched in our blood and tears.” Was this the shy girl he’d consoled all those years ago? There was no mercy in her eyes.

“Do you know he wasn’t even my husband’s son? I can tell you that, I’ll never see you again. There was – that’s another thing that happens to us. We’re used, and broken like toys. I wasn’t even married, I wasn’t old enough to marry, but – something happened –” She broke off. “But I loved him. I couldn’t help it.”

* * *

They’d married her to a widower of their acquaintance, one who understood what happened to girls in occupied territories, and could support her; he seemed happy to have a young person around the house. Aziraphale noticed that as she grew bigger, her spirits seemed to come back; it was that way for women sometimes, something his stint as Ruth was teaching him.

There was a day when he sensed she should be close to her time; he had taken to calling at the house two or three times a week, giving herbs that took away the bloat, showing the taciturn, gentle older husband how to ease the strain on her immature body. Today there was no sound of hammer or lathe in the carpentry yard beside the house; a neighbor put his head out the window at his third knock.

“They’re away. ‘Ad to go to Bethlehem where he’s from. Census and tax.” He spat the words with the cynical resignation of someone who knows that the people in power make rules because they can.

“But – she was near her time! What were they thinking?”

“You tell me, Mother.”

* * *

“When he went out to preach I didn’t grudge it. Not for myself. Yusuf was old by then, but we had other sons. Good strong boys. They did the work and took care of me, we were all right. But I begged him over and over to remember what it would come to. The rulers and the priests don’t like people who steal attention from them. They didn’t see he wasn’t doing it to be famous.”

Aziraphale had surreptitiously miracled some sweetmeats from a fold of his tunic and shared them with her. In his experience there was no distress that wasn’t helped by something with honey in it.

“When he started, at first he wouldn’t be away long. He’d come back long enough to rest his feet, then away again. He would bring me these little things that people had given him. A bowl, a brooch, something that was valuable to them. They’d hand them to him like offerings and he didn’t want to hurt their feelings, but he said he didn’t want to be burdened with belongings. He’d met someone from one of the Eastern countries, on the trading roads, who talked about not being attached to – to _things. _Even your own body. Who said the world was a dream and only God was real.”

She fingered a little pin in her shawl that Aziraphale recognized as Celtic work. It had travelled a good way.

“He listened to everyone he met. That’s what some of the others don’t get. He wasn’t trying to tell the big stories about battles and kings that are in the scrolls. He just wanted to tell stories that would make people want to live better lives. They kill you for that.”

* * *

Miraculously – but of course that would be the case – they made it back from Bethlehem all right, though she was pale and had the puffy, lank-haired look of a woman’s body putting itself back together after birth. The town was so jammed that they’d had to put up in a barn, and she’d been pestered by some Persian fortunetellers wearing gilt finery, who wanted to cast a horoscope for the baby, predicting greatness for him. Yusuf had sent them for hot water to clean the child, to shut them up. Aziraphale could tell she was rightly done up, and didn’t need the assignment of his role as Ruth to move him to care for her.

The boy was strong, barn beginnings notwithstanding. Yusuf thumbed the sturdy-looking muscles of his arms as he began to push himself up to crawl, and said he’d be a good carpenter, that he’d have tools sized for him as soon as his hands could hold them. The old man had clearly fallen in love with the young wife he’d married out of charity, and didn’t really care where the baby had come from. Aziraphale saw him arriving once just as “old Ruth” was leaving, carrying a punnet of cherries that must have been dear at the market – it was the wrong time of year for them to come from nearby – because his wife had mentioned wanting them.

Then one day – he’d already been notified that his stint as Ruth was drawing to a close, and ordered to prepare reports – he called to find the same neighbor in the carpentry yard, chasing out a dog that had gotten onto the property.

“Left,” he said. “Her ‘n the baby ’n everything. Hired a donkey from Moshe the merchant in the next street. Something about the king come lookin’ for little kids. I dunno why. They do what they do.” He finally chivvied the skinny mongrel out of the yard with a broom. “They say he’s gettin’ old and sick, and listenin’ to any travelling scammer with a prophecy for him. Some other kids got rounded up. Don’t know where they took em. I’m helpin’ to get all this sold and send the money on when they can write."

Aziraphale went home and wrote his report. He should have been keeping up more with politics. He’d met Herod once, and didn’t like him.

* * *

“There’ll be plenty of people claiming to be him, you know,” he said as they finished the sweets. “Telling stories about him that never happened. I’ve seen the kind of thing before. People will believe it. It makes them feel better.”

She nodded mutely.

“I – may be one of them.”

He rose and dusted crumbs of nutmeat from his tunic. Her eyes searched him.

“Will you – promise not to be frightened if I show you something?”

Her expression didn’t change, nor did she speak, but he sensed her message: _What have I got left to feel?_ He took care to let it happen slowly. It was always a relief to let out his wings, a temptation (would Crowley smile?) to let them burst out in a blaze of holographic white, but this time he let the luminous aura grow slowly, until he was standing in a pool of pale golden glow, the wings less solid than suggested as a double arch of glimmer behind his grateful, released shoulders, the sparkling motes of a halo around his white-gold hair.

He heard her suck her breath in sharply, but she commanded herself, though he noted how she tried momentarily to stand, trembled, and settled back on the rock.

“You’re – like him, aren’t you?” she said. “All those – I was – I still played with _dolls –”_ her face folded in on itself and she turned away from the light he cast.

“Well – yes,” said Aziraphale. “I mean, not _exactly _like him.– he’s much more important, but – yes, I suppose so – “

He had thought she was out of tears. These were quiet, defeated.

“Then can you tell me why – why did _all this_ have to happen?”

She brought her mantle to her eyes again. Aziraphale reached out a hand to her, but now there were voices approaching. It wouldn’t suit for someone to find him touching her here. She didn’t look up.

“My dear,” he said, “please forgive me for what I’m about to do.”

_"And entering into the sepulchre, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a long white garment; and they were affrighted._

_"And he saith unto them, be not affrighted: ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: he is risen, he is not here: behold the place where they laid him. But go your way, tell his disciples and Peter that he goeth before you into Galilee: there shall ye see him, as he said unto you."_

* * *

The show was over, and so was the Sabbath. It was time to get back to work. Crowley was on his way out of town with his loaded donkey – a merchant was always a useful guise for tempting – when he saw the man kneeling over the prostrate body at a turn of the road. Beyond, the country stretched out into orchards. There was no one else to be seen.

“Can you help?”

Crowley drew closer, hobbled the donkey. The man on the ground looked half dead; he had been stripped to his clout, there was a gash on his head and another on his leg, and a big bruise starting over his ribs. He must have put up a fight. The head had bled quite a lot and it was already caking in his hair and eyebrows. Flies were buzzing over some of the places where blood had spilled into the sandy soil.

The kneeling man had hair almost as fiery as Crowley’s own, and a vaguely familiar face. “They were robbing him,” he said. “Took everything he had down to his clothes. I chased them off. Cowards like that always run from a fight. But – at least they didn’t quite kill him, but – “

Crowley knelt on the other side of the prostrate man for a closer look. “He’s breathing all right. We can probably save him. I can take him back into the city on Salome here.”

“Cheeky name for a pack beast."

“She answers to it.” Crowley went to the creature, who was standing with stolid obedience in the growing sunlight, and unloaded a bolt of lightweight flax cloth and a skin of substandard wine that was mainly good for softening up customers. It would wash the wounds all right.

“Here, we need to clean him up and bandage him. Turn him onto his back, let’s get something under his head.”

The other man pulled off his tallis, rolling it up into a cushion, seeming not to care how bloodstained it got. Knowing how twitchy the Jews he'd met were about blood, Crowley was a little surprised.

“Can you see well enough to help?” asked the rescuer, nodding at Crowley’s smoked glasses. He’d had practice in explaining the unlikely artifact that hid his eyes from view.

“Had them made for me by a Greek doctor. I’m sensitive to light.”

He tore away a length of the flax linen, soaked it in wine – the volatile pong surrounded them in the dry air – and began to dab cautiously at the beaten man’s wounded head. He groaned but didn’t wake. The rescuer took another length and began to work at the leg gash. The blood had clotted and dried quickly and the wound was ugly; it took tiny daubs and repeated wetting.

“Not a lot of other gingers around here,” said the rescuer. “You from Edom?”

“A lot farther away than that.”

“You speak well.”

“I’ve been told that.”

They worked in silence a while longer, turning the man to blot at the lesser wounds, cleaning his face – he hissed when the wine stung his eyes, but there was nothing for it – and trickling a little water from one of the bottles on the pack donkey into his mouth. He was still unconscious, or mostly so, but his pupils were the same size when Crowley thumbed the lids up, and he could clearly feel everything down to his toes. He was probably concussed, but with enough rest he’d likely make it.

Crowley’s memory kicked in as they started to tear the linen into strips.

“Hey, didn’t I see you when they nailed up that street preacher the other day?”

The rescuer reacted remarkably, freezing in the midst of ripping the linen, with a hunted look in his eyes.

“Yeah, I remember. You were right at the edge of the crowd and you had that shawl over your face, but then it fell away. You never stopped looking. Most everyone else did.”

“It was my penance,” the other man said quietly.

“Overrated custom. For what?”

The linen began to rip again; it was tough cloth and took some work. “You might have heard one of his people turned him over to the priests. That was me.”

Crowley whistled. “What’d you do that for? Fight over a girl? No promotion?”

“He told me to.”

“Why the penance then? Fulfilled a request.”

“I should have –” The man bent to his work again. “He said there was a plan, and that was my part in it. I didn’t know it would end like that. I really thought he had a plan.”

“Yeah. Heard that before.”

Crowley wrapped the long shin gash in a spiral of two layers of linen, The wound seeped a little, stopped.

“I don’t understand it. None of the others were as loyal as I was. None of them got his message like I did. Maybe Matthew, dunno. Just care for each other, love each other, the rest comes. Like this man. Some people would just pass him by. Was it so hard for you to care? For me?” The man squirted a swallow of the wine into his mouth, without asking, winced at the harshness. Crowley followed suit. “They all had their own spin. Sticking in their own little hobby horses. I _got_ him. Why did he pick me?”

“Maybe that’s why,” said Crowley. The damaged man was breathing more easily now; Crowley turned his head to the side, in case anything came up. The rescuer was working on the head gash, which was trickier. “They thought he was trendy. Some of them. Quick enough to run away, weren’t they? I heard Peter denied having anything to do with him three times in that one night after they took him.” Crowley refrained from mentioning his own hand in that. “_Three times.”_ He took another chug of the wine, now the wounds were clean, like someone swallowing liquid courage. “Cowards run. But I hear they’ve all got plans to go out preaching on their own.” The head wound was tied now, and it looked like it was going to stay on.

“Let’s try to lift him,” said Crowley. “You at his knees. I’ve got a little cord left from tying on the panniers, we can load him on Salome good and snug. Upsy-daisy.”

“You should be careful on this road. They’re still around and you’re a treasure chest here.”

“Well, after I take him back into town, see to getting him help, I’ll leave by another road. Can’t all be Highwayman’s Alley.”

“You’d be surprised.”

Crowley got the unconscious man’s arms around Salome’s coarsely maned neck, found the cordage. “You stay safe too.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said the rescuer. “My road stops at that tree.”

He nodded toward the edge of the orchard, where broad, stout branches spread in the Mediterranean sun. "Waited too long, didn't want to do it on Shabbos, but now..." He bent to pick up a coil of sturdy rope that Crowley hadn't noticed in the distraction of caring for the other man.

“Oh no. Oh, no no no no no,” he said, comprehension dawning instantly. “You’re not going to do that. You can go somewhere else. Sleep a night. Get drunk. Just – don’t.”

“What do you care?”

“Your lives are short enough, aren’t they?”

“_Our_ lives? Yeah, under Rome it’s chancy but here I am, don’t want to be. Know what to do about it.” The wounded man was snug on the animal’s back now, face down, legs dangling in front of her crupper. “That’s _my _plan. _He _said there was a plan, I don’t know what it was, but he didn’t tell me how to live with myself afterward.”

There was a beat of silence. “Take it from me,” said Crowley, “there _is _a plan. Doesn’t mean you have to do that to yourself.”

“How do you know?” spat the man. “Who have you ever betrayed?”

Crowley looked at him silently; slowly, deliberately drew the smoked glasses away from his face. The man stared fixedly but didn’t flinch at the sight of his serpent eyes, his slit-pupiled, luminous, citrine-yellow eyes.

“I come from a_ lot_ farther away than Edom,” Crowley repeated. “And you think I don’t know about _plans?_ That’s all I’ve been hearing for my whole bloody _existence_ is about a _Plan_! Lot longer than you have!” He could see rage rising in the other man’s eyes along with the bafflement and confusion, but he rolled on. “Yeah, there is one, he was part of it, you think you’re the only one who never gets his questions answered? We’re all supposed to just _do our jobs,_ they never give you a reason, never say well done, here’s why we asked. He gave you a job. You did it. It hurt. Welcome to the Great Ineffable Bloody Plan. Don’t run now. That’s what cowards do.”

Their eyes were locked for a long moment. The rescuer reached behind his neck, thumbed a cord over his head and pulled out a small bag that he slammed into the dust at Crowley’s feet. It split, and silver coins bounced this way and that. Crowley stood motionless.

“I don’t care where you’re from,” the rescuer said. “Just leave me alone. Get your Greek doctor to take care of him. You can save his life, if you stop just standing there. Mine’s over.”

He turned and walked away into the orchard.

Crowley bent, plucking the coins out of the dust, dropping them one by one into the wallet at his belt. The injured man stirred on Salome’s back, moaning. Crowley bent to adjust the knots that held him, loosening here, tightening there, until he was sure the man was secure and in as little pain as possible. He undid the hobble.

“Come on, girl,” he said, “change of plans.”

The donkey moved off stolidly.

He was still close enough to hear the creak and swish of a laden bough. He only imagined he could hear the snapping sound.

* * *

Crowley found Aziraphale in the caupona that served the Roman troops. Somehow they always knew where to find each other.

“I thought you’d be out of town by now,” said Aziraphale. He was already well down on the wine-jar in front of him.

“So’d I,” said Crowley, signaling for a cup. “Found someone trying to help a man on the road. Beaten and robbed, just another day in the big city.”

“That was good of you, dear.”

“Don’t say that so loudly.”

“Will he be all right?”

“Should be. He’s upstairs at the inn next door. I sent for a doctor for him.”

“My dear, think if this gets around.”

“I’ll tell them I foresaw a future of bitterness and criminality for him.” Crowley filled the cup and drained it off in one.

“A bit wholesale this early in the day, isn’t it?”

Crowley looked pointedly at the now nearly empty, coarse-glass flagon.

“I’ll tell you mine If you’ll tell me yours, angel.”

* * *

“… so in the end, I told a lie today. And yet that was what Heaven told me to do. She’ll keep the secret, I saw it in her face. No one in this country listens to women anyway.”

Crowley tipped up the flagon. “Well, _I-I-I-I-I,”_ he drawled as he tended to do when the wine was kicking in – this was the second, and he waved for a third as he spoke – “tried to tell a truth. Didn’t go over very well.”

He explained, while he was still coherent enough to tell the story straight through.

“There were thirty shekels when I’d picked it all up – ‘nuf t’buy him time to recover here and pay the doctor. Bit left over for ‘s much of this plonk as we need. Fucking crime what they sell the soldiers, at these prices.”

“There’s better. I just ordered without thinking. Why’d you do that?”

“Do what?”

“The doctor. The inn. It’s not very – demonic."

“Aaah, it was so much like a story that preacher told. Always like it when someone tells good stories. Passes the time. ‘ll miss him.”

He drained his cup.

“Can’t b’lieve you came clean with her, angel.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Aziraphale, finding something extraordinarily interesting in the bottom of his own cup. “Whatever she says they’ll put down to grief. These things never get into the books.”

“ ‘S’why we have to – sssss – ‘member the storytellers.” He turned to face Aziraphale, the smoked glasses inscrutable, blank. “Prom’se me something, angel? If I ever – ever try to run away from – from seein' someth'n through, y’ll yank me back by the hair? ‘S hard, you know – wha’ we do – sometimes. Sometimes.”

“I know, Crowley." Aziraphale felt his own eyes welling; he thought of touching Crowley’s hand, as he’d touched hers, thought better of it. He was properly on the way to being tits-up drunk before noon and didn’t much care. Angels’ tears sparkle a little, if you look at them in the right light.

“Wh’d – Crowley, why would She do this? It was _Her_ son too. ‘S’ official line anyway. Why?”

“You’re asking me? I don’ know, angel. I don’ know.”

“Let’s order something better. A lot of it.”

“Good idea,” said the demon. “My splash.”

_finis_

**Author's Note:**

> By tradition, Judas Iscariot was depicted with red hair in medieval and Renaissance imagery, and the term "Judas-hair" even had some currency; there was a French saying that a red-haired man could never be a priest because of the association. Edom, a territory whose name means "red earth" (a cognate of the name _Adam_) was supposedly home to a concentration of redheads, and both Jesus and Judas have been represented as having Edomite ancestry.
> 
> The springboard for this story was the poem "Saint Judas" by the mid-20th-century classically-cadenced American poet James Arlington Wright.
> 
> _A pack of hoodlums beating up a man._  
Running to spare his suffering, I forgot  
My name, my number, how my day began,  
How soldiers milled around the garden stone  
And sang amusing songs; how all that day  
Their javelins measured crowds; how I alone  
Bargained the proper coins, and slipped away.
> 
> _Banished from heaven, I found this victim beaten,_  
Stripped, kneed, and left to cry. Dropping my rope  
Aside, I ran, ignored the uniforms:  
Then I remembered bread my flesh had eaten,  
The kiss that ate my flesh. Flayed without hope,  
I held the man for nothing in my arms.
> 
> Salome, of course, was the name of the stepdaughter of Herod, daughter of Herodias, Princess of Judaea. What the donkey thought of being named for her is not recorded.


End file.
